|
|
|
|
|
|
Welcome to the artissimo.gr pages of News ! |
|
|
English Language : Music Technology : News : Summer 2005 
Saturday 2 July 2005 : Orchestration at the Home Studio using Sonar, Synful Orchestra, GigaStudio 3 and Alesis QS8 : the whole story. |
|
|
Experiences Well, using all this stuff at the same time definitely raises certain problems : Sonar is a professional sequencing tool, Synful Orchestra is a powerful DX instrument hosted by Sonar, GigaStudio is one of the very best software samplers existing at this time and Alesis QS8 is a powerful stand-alone hardware synthesizer with piano-action keyboard (notice : Sonar is cooperating with Alesis QS8 via a Midi Interface (Midex8) by Steinberg). What a variety, eh ? Well, let's have a look at various stages of the overall process : 1. Choosing the right sounds : since no one can afford the full sound set of GigaStudio :-) , if one can use a very good orchestral sample, then, why not use it ? GigaPiano 2 and Harp (given free by Vienna Symphonic Library with GigaStudio 3) are very good indeed. For orchestral strings and wind instruments, Alesis QS8 is not bad at all (having a certain expansion card with orchestral samples), but Synful Orchestra is very realistic when articulation comes into play. Alesis QS8 will be solely given the part of the harpsichord : thanks God its sound is good, because there is no other resource (of mine) available for a harpsichord sound (we should then go back to old veteran Yamaha SY-77, but orchestration would just "stretch" a bit :-) ). OK then, we have just chosen the appropriate sounds.  2. Problem with the dynamics : Uf ! harpsichord is playing too loud, Synful Orchestra flute is playing too softly, Synful trumpet is rather loud, harp does not respond well to key velocity etc. etc. One must be fairly patient : tweaking original volumes, testing with the ear all possible sonic combinations, then, tweaking again, then testing again, then again, again, again ! What an insanity ! At last, you decide on a certain setup with the best compromises done. 3. Problem with the effects : brrrr! Alesis QS8 harpsichord needs extra tweaking (taking up controller D a bit), GigaStudio had been adjusted by a previous project and is already OK, Synful Orchestra is a DX instrument and its effect-section is very easy to configure. Wow ! Now, all instruments are sounding almost at the same level and with almost the same effect quantities applied. Uf ! Time for some sleep now ! 4. Well, the whole composition is over (having been another stage not to be mentioned here) and now we should do the recording. Since Synful Orchestra is being a little bit "loaded" and GigaStudio is constantly taking serious computing resources, this is always the moment when I wish I had used hardware synthesizers exclusively ! :-) However, things were not that bad. After a couple of playback tests, the latency was eventually just set to 10,2 msec and the sound card (Waveterminal 192X) just did a very good job ! I also found out that when you start and stop either the playback or the recording frequently and abruptly, then, DX instruments tend to make Sonar's sound engine fail from time to time : you are also getting a lot of unexpected "clicks" in the sound that DX instruments are producing. I didn't manage to figure out why all this kind of behaviour, perhaps memory fragmentation or something similar. (Anyway, next day, at the very final recording, there were all OK !). However, no problem with the stopped engine, you just restart it and perhaps is a good idea to reload the whole Sonar program just before the final recording (just to be sure...). 5. Another nasty problem was the one with the midi event handling : because of the fact that when playback stopped all midi controllers were reinitialised (that's a project setting in Sonar) I was listening to a part in a completely different way if I just played a few measures of it or the whole composition from the beginning : a few midi controller events were the reason for this. Well, at that moment of the creative effort you can't remember everything at once : some people are calling this lack of experience, perhaps they are right. However, some simple settings were enough to overcome this problem as well.  6. Another - rather peculiar kind of problem - which occurred in the very final stage : while listening to the target mp3 file, at a very specific phrase where the strings prevailed I could hardly recognize my own sound ! The sweet string bowings and all the sound attractive characteristics (articulation of notes and beauty of the sound) were just gone ! But, why ?! Because of my earlier successive setting errors I had become a little bit pessimistic : did I make another serious error again ? I would have no courage to start the whole process of creating the target mp3 file from stratch ... Well, well, well - no need to worry - I was just listening to the composition through my (TFT) monitor's speakers. But, then, such a big difference in the feeling ? Even though tired enough, I quickly set up the normal Home Studio scheme and listened to the very specific passage : that was a perfect sound again ! Uff ! "Be careful with the monitor's speakers Mr Careless ! Just do the job the way you should always do it and no bungles !". That was a short horror story on working with a variety of tools and equipment. Well, music is always paying back for all such kinds of problematic situations, isn't it ?! [the whole article was actually the story of the composition "Cyclamens" ] |
|
|
|